Justice First will collaborate with underserved communities facing key climate risks to implement community-driven energy pathways that support transformative climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate change poses acute mortality, livelihood, and wellbeing threats to underserved communities, due to exposure to the climate risks themselves, but also due to exclusion from and/or constrained capacity to participate in climate mitigation and adaptation planning and decision-making (IPCC 2022, Stephens 2020). It is this latter challenge that Justice First seeks to address, through the co-production of locally-appropriate knowledge and action plans. In doing so, we not only seek to build capacity to confront key climate risks, we leverage emerging opportunities to restructure energy systems in inclusive and sustainable ways.
Our Novelty
Our project includes several novel elements that lend themselves to producing new high impact knowledge to support real and lasting change, including: a focus on cascading risks; critical analysis of intersectional equity; and attention to demand-side energy dynamics by forefronting community-embedded social infrastructures, values and practices.
Our Approach
Our interdisciplinary research team will undertake a comparative international case study that embraces transdisciplinary and community-based methods. The key to confronting climate risks in vulnerable communities is meaningful community participation in defining the problem and solutions. Effective, lasting change demands the operationalization of multiple knowledges across disciplines and the science-society interface. We have secured relations with six partner communities, capturing a diverse spectrum of local energy governance, and vulnerabilities, due to unique sets of intersectional positionalities. Each community also has valuable knowledge and experience that can be mobilized and shared. We will co-produce climate responsive energy planning tools tailored to meet the needs of, and be directly deployed by, highly climate vulnerable communities.
The Problem
Energy access and affordability are critical to sustainability and wellbeing for individuals, families, communities, and businesses, yet are inequitably distributed (Baker 2021). Energy inequities are exacerbated by climate change, due to disparate investment in and risks to critical infrastructure, and an increase in precarious living conditions. For instance, immediate threats posed by power outages during extreme events have cascading and inequitably distributed consequences for critical needs, including heating and cooling, mobility, access to food and water, health care, and information and communication systems (Romero-Lankao et al. 2018). Energy policies pursued in the name of climate mitigation, moreover, can impose further injustices, such as economic burdens on the poor, and loss of land access for Indigenous, local and traditional uses (Stephens 2022a; Sovacool et al. 2023). Indigenous and other underserved groups face a climate change ’double burden,’ being highly vulnerable, while also at risk of negative impacts of political and industrial responses (Normann 2020).